Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to holding conversations, and more particularly, to holding private conversations in a context of the content of a webpage.
Description of the Related Art
In the digital era, providing content and having interactions related to the presented content has taken on a whole new meaning. For instance, the content of an article is made available to all the users as soon as the article is “published” on the internet. The internet has established itself as an interactive medium wherein users are able to publish articles of interest, facilitate chat, create/participate in discussion groups and interactive blogs. In the highly competitive world of the internet, content providers who publish articles on their website are looking into ways to engage a user in order to increase and retain the traffic to their website. One way the content providers can engage/retain users is by providing customized tools to enable users to participate in conversations on stories/articles published on a content provider's website and postings to weblogs. Additionally, there are a lot of social networking sites that enable users to engage in meaningful interactions with selective group of users on articles published on the internet.
Different content providers and social networking sites provide different types of customized tools that enable users to facilitate conversations with their friends and family about online content. However, these customized tools have some drawbacks or have features that are less than desirable. For instance, some customized tools are provided on the social networking sites that allow users to hold conversations about a content published on a website in an offline mode. As a result, conversations related to the content either lack the context or require unnecessary navigation to obtain the context of the conversation. Some other customized tools use social network plug-ins to enable generation and sharing of conversation for the content but the conversations related to the content are public. Still other customized tools allow creation of circles of friends/families for sharing conversation related to a content using a user's social graph. However, the circle of friends has to be created apriori and the conversations are not provided inline within a context of the content.
It would, therefore, be desirable to have a tool that allows a user to view content on a website and start a conversation with a select group of friends/families that is private and in context of the content.
It is in this context that the embodiments of the invention arise.